Lost Languages
by Andrew Robinson
It's a treat to encounter a book that gets better as it goes, rather than sort of losing its thread and wedging out into platitudes and references. This one starts . . . well, a bit lame, though extremely well illustrated. The real strength comes in the last part, which I'll describe presently.
I almost don't have to tell you that Robinson's book does not concern lost languages, because if they really are lost, what's to write about? (Raëlian dreams of alien tongues aside.) The subject here is unread systems of writing like Egyptian hieroglyphics and Cretan Linear B.
Whoa, unread? People have been reading Egyptian tomb walls for 150 years and tabulating King Minos' olive oil jars for 50. We even know the names of quite a few Maya rulers and nobles. Robinson uses the first third of his book to tell the history of three decipherments that succeeded. For a millennium and a half, Egyptian writing was side-on pictures and scribbles; then the Rosetta Stone gave a way into it. No one thought the Linear B script could be a way of writing Greek until Michael Ventris solved the system. The first Europeans to see Mayan texts had nearly all of them burned as heathen scriptures; the surviving codices and stone carvings reveal a strange culture of glory and humiliation.
Why include them if they aren't lost then? In order to build paradigms. People in the 19th century didn't know ancient Egyptian and couldn't be sure whether the tomb walls bore writing or allegorical pictures. It took not one but a cluster of breakthroughs to get past centuries of ignorance and bad habits. Somebody had to conceive that the living language Coptic is a daughter of Egyptian, somebody else had to recognize the cartouches on the stone as enclosing royal names, another party had to intuit that the hieroglyphic writing could be phonetic, and finally the decipherment had to check out with "virgin" texts. Well, sure, you put all that together and it sounds simple, don't it? In the same way, a series of clever inferences, new discoveries, blinding illuminations and retesting helped Ventris read Linear B.
I've never been happy with accounts of the Mayan writing. Typically, the story goes: A brilliant archaeologist (usually from the writer's country) figures out that many marks have numbers in them and may be dates. Then it's fast forward to the late 1980s and people are seeing jaguars and corn gods everywhere they look (except Erich Von Däniken, who imagines spaceships). These stories are illustrated with Mayan glyphs, always reproduced as tiny squares with uncertain shapes packed into them. I ask the void, Who the hell figured out it was a jaguar? It doesn't look like a jaguar. Robinson is no better than the rest in this respect. (At right: a "jaguar" glyph; Lost Languages, p. 113.) Thank you for your patience.
So there's a system to these things. Links to known languages, cryptography on the symbols and their patterns and statistics, use of every historical fact about the people who did the writing, and checking against "new" material. Good, does the system work on other kinds of writing? Here is the stronger part of Lost Languages, Robinson's account of some works in progress. He frankly titles this part of the book "Undeciphered Scripts," and in it he proves himself to be a well-informed, hopeful skeptic with a strong analytical faculty and no undue respect for great persons. The cases examined here: Meroitic (ancient Nubia, modern Sudan), Etruscan (Italy), Linear A (Crete), Proto-Elamite (modern Iran), Rongorongo (Easter Island), Zapotec and Isthmian (Mexico), Indus (Pakistan and India), and "the Phaistos Disc" (Crete again). In each of the eight chapters, the author describes the writing, puts it in as much historical and archaeological context as he can, tells who has been working on it and how far they claim to have come, and sums up with his own assessment of progress and prospects. It's good work, and it's better at the end than in the middle.
Consider rongorongo, which people living on Easter Island (Rapanui) at an unknown time scratched into wood with sharks' teeth. Robinson surveys the texts: tablets and staffs so few in number that they all have names. He gives a history of research on the script, beginning with some informant interviews in 1869 and running down to pretty much today. It isn't clear whether the people found on the island by the first European explorers in the 1770s could still write or read the inscriptions, so all the early information is doubtful. The system still compels interest, though, and the author recounts the methods used by scholars to attack it: statistical analysis, attempts to reconstruct the language represented (almost surely a Polynesian tongue), and blue-sky "readings" that may make good sense or possibly not. The online edition of Der Spiegel reported in 1999 that "the texts—half Bible, half Kamasutra—deal with the most secret cult of Easter Island. 'The slabs contain details of deflorations and sexual rituals,' says the codebreaker, 'all the texts revolve around the sphere of the sacred.'" And maybe so; on balance, however, the published reports can't be entirely separated from (in Michael Ventris' words) "fantasy, coincidence or circular reasoning." (At left: a bit of rongorongo; Lost Languages, p. 239.)
The last big chapter deals with the "Phaistos Disc," discovered in 1908 by archaeologists digging a palace in Crete. "In fairness," writes Robinson, "it must be said that the hoax theory is very much a minority opinion" (p. 303), but it may well be the one he holds. The disk is made of clay and has apparently stamped characters running in spirals on both sides (at right, a portion of the center of Side A; Lost Languages, p. 300). No other inscription in the same characters is known, so the 240-odd signs here are all we have of this writing system. Now if you took 240 characters of an unknown script representing an unidentified language and claimed you could read them, it would be hard for anyone to prove you wrong; Fiddler's Green for puzzle-solvers, allee-allee-in-free. "Hear ye, Cretans and Greeks: my great, my quick!" begins one solution, but another (amateur) scholar says the disk is the board for a 3500-year-old game of Chutes and Ladders, while a German interprets the text as a sermon and a British book calls it a calendar. As Robinson does, I'll give the classicist John Chadwick the last word: "There is only one valid test of sense: can it be shown to agree with what is deducible about the text in advance? In the case of the disc, this is virtually nothing" (p. 314).
Lost Languages is a good read, an attractive and well-illustrated book. The author has a most healthy attitude toward what's been proved and what hasn't.
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Lost Languages